estrellaSMC wrote:
blauSamstag wrote:
So i would suggest that if you do not feel moved to communicate, you should perhaps examine your spiritual life and see if you can find out what is lacking.
I have believed that there is a God for...I don't know how long. Mainly because the idea that this world just "happened" to come into existence has never made a bit of sense to me. But I have never really understood who that God is, or been able to really feel connected to or able to talk to God. I mean, how do you talk to someone who never talks back? And if you can't communicate, how can you get close to them?
Mormons believe that God does talk back, though generally in a non-verbal way. More of a feeling, or a sense of direction, that requires quiet meditation to realize, or which may only become clear in the first moments after waking.
estrellaSMC wrote:
I sometimes wonder if two things in my childhood affected this. First, my dad...wasn't the best. He basically ignored me unless something went wrong with his computer, and then he'd blame me. People always say that they picture God like their earthly father. The other thing was that when I was going through the "imaginary friend" stage, I never imagined them beyond a name and maybe what they looked like...though most of them were just names. I never thought about personality or about how they would interact with me. They were just...there. Didn't speak, didn't do anything, really, and I never talked to or did anything with them, either. I wonder if that is somehow connected to this issue.
It's hard to say. My father is quite wise, slow to anger, and prone to lecturing. A man who easily enters into a detailed discussion of abstract concepts. So i would have a hard time disagreeing with that theory based on my own experience.
I went through a similar "imaginary friend" phase.
I'm not here to argue atheism - I am, after all, a moral relativist, and a lot of people get a lot out of the kind of faith i seem to be incapable of - but I have an easier time imagining that this world just "happened" to come into existence over a length of time that humans are generally incapable of conceiving of. A lot of primitive cultures would stop counting after some number and just had a word for "many". We've come a long way from that, but very few people have clear concepts of just what a trillion of something is, for example. Our brains can't hold that number properly.
I'm from Utah, we have some great deserts here. Experts can drone on and on about how long it took for the rivers to carve the canyons, and I've stood on the edge of the Island in the Sky mesa and looked down 2200 feet to the confluence of the green and colorado rivers, but the dates didn't really gel in my mind.
And then i learned about desert varnish, a black coating of mineral deposits that covers some rock formations. A microns thick coating that takes such an unimaginable length of time to build up that where it has been scraped away thousands of years ago there is no sign of it returning. Even with the help of certain bacteria to deposit the manganese it appears that it takes unfathomable millions of years to form.
And then after it forms, wind and water erode the rock away, over unfathomable millions of years.
Oh, and that's sandstone, that formed over unfathomable millions of years, from the eroded remains of some other kind of formation that eroded away over unfathomable millions of years.
It's easy for me to believe that we "happened" as a series of small changes over a window of time that i cannot conceive of. Easier than believing that a being i cannot conceive of did it in 6 days.
11 Apr 2012, 12:07 am
